The Kobo application for the iPad on Wednesday added "Reading Life," which brings social aspects - including sharing, a personal "book cover," and achievements - to reading.

Kobo - a company that markets an e-reader, an e-bookstore, and numerous apps - said that the Reading Life app includes statistics, check-ins with social networking sites and even characters in books, and game-like achievements.

Kobo Reading Life is now available for download for free from Kobo.com or from the Apple App Store; iPad users with the app already installed can automatically download and upgrade to the new app, Kobo said. Kobo claims to offer 2.2 million eBooks; the Kobo e-reader is sold at Wal-Mart and Borders, where it was recently discounted.

"People who are making the switch to eReading and building their lifetime libraries want an innovative social experience to go with it," said Mike Serbinis, Kobo's chief executive, in a statement. "eReading is going social, local and real-time with Kobo Reading Life, allowing us to create a fun, engaging and meaningful experience for our users."

One of the most creative elements to the new app is the personalized book cover, a dynamic mosaic of a user's reading life. A video demonstration of the app displayed a series of images that represented the covers of various books, which could be clicked on and explored.

Another way for a user to monitor his or her own reading habits is via the use of statistics, which can track the number of books and pages a user has read, even down to pages per minute and the times in which a user most frequently read.

Kobo has also added achievements, ranging from the "Once Upon a Time" achievement for opening the first book to 'The Twain' earned by those that read daily, and 'The Witching Hour' for readers who read into the wee hours of the night.

Naturally, all this can be shared via Facebook or Twitter, including "highlighted" text, a feature that rival Amazon's Kindle pioneered.

Mark Hachman Mark joined ExtremeTech in 2001 as the news editor, after rival CMP/United Media decided at the time that online news did not make sense in the new millennium.
Mark stumbled into his career after discovering that writing the great American novel did not pay a monthly salary, and that his other possible career choice, physics, required a degree of mathematical prowess that he sorely lacked.
Mark talked his way into a freelance assignment at CMP’s Electronic Buyers’ News, in 1995, where he wrote the...
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